Recommendations for creating a new "applications" website in .NET.

Question

I am a member of a non-profit organization that asked me to help them redo their website.

However, they not only want content and design changes, but also want to use features that require programming at the back end. For example, an organization has “classes” with a limited number of slots that people must sign in advance. When people sign up for classes, there is additional documentation that they must provide in order to be able to attend the class.

They have several queries in this genre that they want to add to the site.

If it was just a redesign of their existing content, I would simply recommend that they use something like Wordpress or any other standard CMS to update their look. But since they also need these additional features, I'm not sure how to proceed.

I have not yet had the opportunity to program an MVC site, so I decided to use it as an opportunity to learn MVC. At the same time, I do not want to reinvent the wheel. So I looked at CMS, like Orchard, which used MVC, but was apparently quite extensible.

Does Orchard use meaning for this scenario? If not, why not? Are there any other recommendations for CMS? I also looked at Umbraco, as it seems that their latest release uses MVC, but then I read that it is a little buggy and lacks some of the features that they had in the old version. Then I was not sure that this would be the right way.

In the end, I'm not even sure that I'm going to CMS at all! I wonder if I could better learn MVC if I just made the application from scratch. In this case, I considered the possibility of using CMS for web content, and then programmed part of the application as a separate web application, which was associated with their main site (possibly register.mysite.com).

I am just looking for recommendations and recommendations. How would you advance if you were on my side?

My day job is a developer in a large organization. I mainly program business applications using .NET. But we did not have MVC applications yet, so my MVC skills are practically absent. I want to learn MVC, but I also want to get something back in non-profit at a decent time.

.... so I ... there it is ...

Answer 1

Using open source CMS is not a bad idea, but I personally prefer not to use them. Even the official ASP.NET website uses Umbraco .

I do not recommend using WordPress because it is written in PHP and you are a .NET developer. WordPress is powerful and extensible, but it will be better for you to use .NET CMS . You can fully understand it and make any changes.

I personally prefer to develop my own environment and environment. What for? Since my opinion is that open source CMS provides more power than required , and developing modules for it is sometimes a big problem. In most cases, I can develop what my client wants as a simple web application. The client does not want to use the CMS credentials (for example: adding pages, adding news, etc.), so I move on to my own structure. But remember that this is only my personal opinion .

Back to CMS:

I have not tried Umbraco , but I looked at the source of Orchard . This is really big! The code is really complicated!

If I were in your shoes:

First I checked the Open Source CMS (specifically Umbraco, which is built using MVC). I would develop Hello World! modules for him, and if it were nice and easy, I would go with him.

But as a rule, I end up developing my own web application. I use MVC and I suggest you use it.

Here are some good open source applications developed using MVC. They also use design patterns such as Unit of Work, Repository Template, etc.

http://shrinkr.codeplex.com/

http://kigg.codeplex.com/

http://nerddinner.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

You cannot do this without writing your own code, even with umbraco / joomla or any other CMS. Since you already have web development experience ... give MVC a chance. Kernel coding is the same ... MVC makes a lot of design easy and structured.

Answer 3

I would go with the MVC app for this simply because it will be a great experience for you and something really good to add to your resume. In any case, if you are not familiar with any existing CMS solutions, it will probably take the same amount of time to configure, configure, and encode the modules you want to make a simple MVC application from scratch.